Viewers tuning into the latest and last series of BBC drama Happy Valley have found themselves amused after Sarah Lancashire’s Catherine Cawood described how she was on the lookout for an ‘alien liaison officer’ in episode four. During the scene in question, the character explained to her colleague why.
"Gorkem saw a strange light moving in an erratic manner over Erringden Moor at 5am yesterday morning so he started googling stuff and found out about that bobby in Todmorden in 1980," Cawood said. "He thinks he’s been abducted by aliens."
While Cawood might be hard pushed to find an officer who specialises in ‘alien liaison’, the Todmorden UFO mystery is a real thing. Read on to find out all about it. For more TV and showbiz stories, subscribe to our newsletter here.
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Manchester Evening News reports how in 1980, PC Alan Godfrey investigated the mysterious death of Zigmund Adamski. The body of the 56-year-old miner had been found on top of a 10ft pile of coal in a yard in the small West Yorkshire town of Todmorden, having disappeared from home three days earlier.
He had no visible injuries except for a mark, perhaps a burn, on the back of his neck and head. "He had this terrifying expression," said Mr Godfrey in an interview with ITV several years later. "It can only be described as, whatever he last saw had terrified him.
"There were no footprints or disturbance on the coal, how did he get up there? I couldn't work it out. I could see that on the top of his head were individual burn marks and on the back of his neck there was a rather large weeping type of burn, and there had been an ointment smeared on it."
Zigmund's death sparked a number of UFO conspiracy theories. An inquest later gave a heart attack as the cause of death, but the coroner James Turnbull recorded an open verdict, later describing it 'one of the most puzzling cases that I've come across in 25 years'. Speaking to reporters after the hearing, PC Godfrey said there was a possibility Adamski had been abducted by aliens. At the time, he said: "I am open-minded, I can't rule it out.”
Six months after the discovery, PC Godfrey was called out to an early morning report of cows wandering across the road on a Todmorden estate. But when he arrived at the scene he said something peculiar happened.
"I was driving up the road when I could see an object in front of me," he said. "It looked to be completely blocking the road. As I got nearer and nearer this object, I could see it wasn't quite what I was expecting to meet at 5 o'clock on a November morning in Todmorden. It was diamond-shaped. The bottom half was spinning. It was hovering about five feet off the ground. It was about 20 ft wide, 14ft high."
PC Godfrey's police radio then suddenly stopped working, so he frantically grabbed his notepad to begin drawing the object. "After it had all happened, I realised there was half an hour missing from me drawing the object to me turning up on the other side," he said. "I was really curious. I wanted to know what happened in that half-hour."
That missing 30 minutes led Mr Godfrey to undergo regressive hypnosis under the watchful eye of doctors in a bid to trigger his memory. During the session, which was filmed, the policeman described his car being engulfed in a bright, white light. He then appeared to lose consciousness before waking up in a room where he sees a tall man. He's also surrounded by six small robots.
PC Godfrey then described being subjected to some kind of medical examination before being put back in his car. He later realised, echoing the mark found on Mr Adamski's body, that his left boot had split open and he had a small, itchy red mark, like a burn, on his foot. Godfrey's account would make it into the papers and he became an international news story. He also became the object of ridicule and his claims were seen as an embarrassment to the force.
He said he was later hounded out of the police and talked of the negative impact the sighting had on his life. "I wish I'd never seen the UFO, particularly because of the effects on my children," he said. "It's not easy having a policeman as a father but when he's a policeman who sees a UFO, it's even worse."
The events surrounding the Todmorden mystery will perhaps never be known. Ever since the two incidents, Todmorden and the Calder Valley have become UFO sighting hotspots, dubbed 'Britain's answer to Roswell'. Happy Valley concludes on BBC One at 9pm on Sunday, February 5.
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